Peter Navarro Invented an Expert for His Books, Based on Himself (2019)
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
That's just an honorary title, and at most places can be revoked for sufficient damage to the university's reputation. This would seem to be the case, especially because at least one of the books with the fake economics expert seems to have been written while he was still an active faculty member there.
His association with Irvine has been mentioned on national news, and although folks in academia may not realize that the general public thinks "professor emeritus" means he's still associated with the university, they're going to learn really quickly. Plus the "fake expert" thing is just so embarrassingly stupid...
It's true that it's an honorific, but I think it has a little more teeth than you think. At the institutions I've worked at, it comes with a few perks (like faculty-level library privileges), but it also includes the ability to serve on MA/PhD committees -- which is to say, you can be part of the group of people who certify the completion of an academic degree, which is not a privilege normally extended to retired professors. I've seen it granted when someone is switching institutions, but would like to remain the major advisor for a PhD candidate.
But whatever the case, the person is absolutely "still associated with the university;" that is part of the reason they're awarded. It's an award, certainly, but it's also a way for an academic to keep their credentials and for a university to keep their association with a (sometimes famous) academic.
But yes: It can be revoked at any time. I would be surprised if this one wasn't.
I've served on PhD defenses where you had uncredentialed people on the committee, but who could not sign off on the degree.
This probably looks different to you if you're a student, because you typically don't see the paperwork that gets sent around afterward. But a diploma is a legal document. There is no "rubber stamping" of anything. Not if the school would like to maintain its accreditation.
Don't they at least need to have a at least somewhat relevant PhD? Where I live that is definitely the case.
remember the "de minimus" is going away May 2nd too
each little shipment from aliexpress, etc.
will have a tariff of 30% of the "value of the postal item containing goods for merchandise"
with a minimum fee of $50
FIFTY DOLLARS
It purposely kills all overseas shipments of even small items.
How many years until all that made in USA? TEN years? Never?
Besides dropping some product lines they're moving to offshore local jobs to remote Filipino workers.
if territories like Puerto Rico would finally get some serious investment if they are tariff immune
No DIY person who needs just one little part is going to pay $50
Not just TVs, fans, radios, etc.
ie. I wanted to get some $10 PM2.5 sensors but they will be $50 now
One can have the naive hope that people will start to care about competency.
Of course, we also have covid with estimated 1M Excess deaths... So, probably not.
Vanguard's lifecycle funds (picking them because they get promoted a lot as a good choice, courtesy of good marketing and lower fees and generally good returns). Their 2030 fund, the one that people are recommended to select if they're retiring around 2028-2032, is down 4.54% YTD, and down 1.42% for the last year. The current market effects have wiped out over a year in gains for a relatively conservative fund.
And that's all from the last two trading days, it was slightly up YTD on Wednesday. And all of this is before the effects of the tariffs come into play. We haven't actually seen the effect of higher import costs hitting companies and consumers yet.
So people approaching retirement are getting hit and hit hard, but it's not quite 20% for them unless they selected an aggressive investment strategy for some reason.
The worst for the Vanguard funds are down about 8% YTD (and likely to get worse) for anyone 25 years or more away from retirement.
EDIT: I don't usually respond to downvotes but it's really important to understand the stock market is a volatile investment. You shouldn't have money you're planning to use in the short or medium term in the stock market. It's a longer term (10 years+) investment.
At least in the Nordic countries, utterly uncontroversial conventional wisdom says something like:
* In your youth save almost-only in stocks; via some index fund, if you don't feel like being an active investor, following the market every day;
* Start with (funds that specialise in) high-growth (= high-risk) stocks; then, as you near middle age, slowly move over to lower-risk (= lower-growth) stocks (or funds specialised therein);
* In middle age, move over to having some part in state bonds;
* As you near retirement age, eliminate high-growth/risk stocks/funds altogether, and draw down the proportion of stocks/funds as a whole, going to an increasing proportion state bonds.
* As you retire, possibly move all-out of stocks / stock index funds and all-in on bonds... Except put some in an ordinary old bank account.
>your comments will be downgraded for lack of left-wing
The comment is kind of left leaning so I doubt that’s the reason for the down votes
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-approval-rating-update...
The tariffs are probably going to be a historical "turn of the tide" moment.
The disaffected are who control the reins and they are not liking what they're seeing. We just need to make sure they have an alternative.
His cult sees him as he was presented on The Apprentice -- rich, powerful, rich, and wise, and rich. Rich is good and if he's rich he's double plus good.
I think the only end to his cult is his shuffling off this mortal coil.
That's the problem: It should be, if not legally, at least in terms of electability.
But with enough of a proportion of racists in the electorate, it's no wonder racists get elected.
Good bye and godspeed, America; it was nice knowing you.
Not sure you ever "knew" America if you think this is the first time racists were ever elected.
1) Back then, racists were elected everywhere else too. America didn't much stand out just because of that.
2) Back then, America a) wasn't led by a moroniac[§], and b) didn't intentionally alienate itself from the rest of the world.
And I'm afraid it's really goodbye this time. I mean, 2016-20 was weird enough, but then we thought normalcy had returned... But then you -- or they? -- went and re-elected him. There's just no way of knowing where America will go; looks like a total basket-case.
Seems quite a lot of Americans agree with me on that, BTW. Didn't they ever know America either?
___
[§]: Maniacal moron, or moronic maniac? Can't make up my mind.
It gave Trump plausible deniability, he can claim he's just doing what great experts from the academia are advocating. And it gave us the market-crash and global trade-war. It's easy for billionaires to lighten up and have fun, but not for most other people.
Tariffs are a sales-tax, which means poor people have to relinguish a larger proportion of their income to the government, than rich people. It is great wealth transfer from ordinary people to the rich. And one can only conjecture that THAT is why Trump and Navarro advocate for it.
I'd guess: Navarro yes; Trump, no. In his case, it's just stupidity.
This behavior is not likely to be seen as a negative by Trump, but rather as a positive "go-getter" trait.
Trump has employed this method of inventing people to talk himself up for many decades:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudonyms_used_by_Donald_Trum...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsYKRUE_D5g
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/national/audio-from-may...
Its actually reasonable to believe that Navarro may have got the idea from Trump whether directly or indirectly.
https://x.com/bezprawnik/status/1303967275373015043
EDIT: Wait a second, I need to check something. EDIT 2: Huh, I think I fell for this the entire time.
It's "Z podobnym problemem mierzyliśmy się, kiedy sprawowaliśmy władzę w latach 2005-2007. Wtedy poszliśmy w kierunku bardzo eksperckim, właśnie otwartych konkursów jeśli chodzi o rady nadzorcze. Trafiali tam eksperci z rynku, trafiały osoby z tytułami naukowymi, z SGH, z innych uczelni. No i problem okazał się taki, że ich sposób myślenia o gospodarce, o zarządzaniu był zupełnie sprzeczny z tym, co Prawo i Sprawiedliwość ma w swoim programie."
Which translates to "We faced a similar problem when we were in power in 2005-2007. Then we went in a very expert direction, precisely open competitions when it came to supervisory boards. Experts from the market ended up there, people with academic degrees, from the Warsaw School of Economics, from other universities. Well, and the problem turned out to be that their way of thinking about the economy, about management was completely contrary to what Law and Justice has in its program."
... so that quote was from editiorial summarising it, not that person himself.
A central issue is 'aggregate demand' - this needs replacement by individual-level demand analysis. An obvious issue is that if a small wealthy sector of society is consuming heavily, while the vast majority is in a belt-tightening phase, any aggregate demand measure is not going to capture either sector and will have a massive distorting effect on projected outcomes. Yes, individual-level models would be vastly more computationally demanding, but this is now possible.
Similarly, consider the effect of lowering interest rates in a system where a small wealthy sector has mechanisms in place to capture all that liquidity, so instead of small business starts increasing, stock buybacks by major corporations are the norm. Again, this is where 'aggregate demand' misses that fine-scale structure that really controls outcomes.
Fundamentally, these economic models aren't capturing the effects of gross wealth inequality. One of the most astute economic contrarians who raises this issue is Gary Stevenson:
https://www.cato.org/regulation/fall-2018/peter-navarros-con... Lemieux, Pierre. 2018. Peter Navarro's Conversion. Regulation, Volume 41, Issue 3, pp. 36 - 43
Navarro is just the idiot sycophant who agreed with him that they are great.
> Navarro was invited to be an advisor after Trump's advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner saw on Amazon that he co-wrote Death by China.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Navarro#Trump_campaign_a...
this explains what you are saying exactly in more detail:
The people that need to watch that clip never will.
It’s really quite odd.
When will we accept that economics is a bullcrap degree, even more so at the doctorate level?
America continuing to bet on anti-intellectualism is the problem. Popular railing against economics is what’s getting us into a recession.
Losing nuance is what gets you backlash. This is what happened in the pandemic and this is part of why we're paying a price now because nobody trusts anyone. And in the era of social media it's doubly easy to lose nuance.
Sure. But part of that nuance is scientific literacy. Treating the influencers who were once scientists as representative of the field is one of the roots of the problem. An influencer will never be nuanced—the medium doesn’t incentivise it.
I'm 61. I've been hearing this about the US national debt since I was a teenager. When do you imagine this "inevitable" currency collapse will occur? Do you consider the recent actions of the current administration to make it more or less likely?
I think the current administration isn't helping but we're talking about a multi-decade process here. Some of what we see today goes back to Bush and Obama policies. It also goes to geopolitical changes, China, India, Russia. Globalization. Technological changes. Climate change. etc. etc.
And yet ... various people, mostly republicans, have spent a good part of my lifetime telling us that the sky is about to fall in.
It may yet fall. But they are starting to seem more like boys that like to cry wolf than prophets.
Are you referring to MMT [1]?
Because it’s not mainstream economics. And it never said you can run deficits without consequence, just that inflation is the limiting result. Which is technically true. But practically useless given the short-term interests of politicians.
Mainstream economics has cautioned against the national debt for decades. Idiots got pitched that economists don’t know what they’re talking about, meanwhile, and so that advice was ignored. Now we’ve gone full circle to blaming the field for the outcome it predicted.
It’s not, literally the first consequential term in the Wikipedia article is “heterodox,” but I’m curious where you came to believe this?
And the justifications given for most social policies come from MMT. Policy makers love MMT, especially progressive ones and ones who want to give out helicopter money. Economists seem cooler on the idea, but it's a mainstream theory among people making economic decisions.
MMT is mostly just Keynseanism taken to a sort of unintuitive but logical conclusion. It's not nearly as heterodox (using the English word) as something like Austrian economics.
Seriously, where are you getting this?
The first consequential word in the article! It’s literally a link to an article about heterodox economics [1]!
An economic theory described as part of "heterodox economics" can, in fact, be relatively mainstream given enough exposure and enough followers (which is where MMT is today). Conversely, parts of "mainstream economics" are relatively controversial and are thus heterodox ways of thinking.
If you think about "orthodox Christianity," the word "orthodox" says nothing about its popularity. The same goes for "heterodox economics."
Pretty much all monetary theories are parts of heterodox economics.
No. It cannot. This time I cite the literal first sentence of the Wikipedia definition of heterodox economics.
> all monetary theories are parts of heterodox economics
Not what heterodox or mainstream mean.
In that respect it's exactly as heterodox as Mises-style Austrian economics, which has similarly failed to persuade mainstream conservatives who share similar ideas about small states of its core ideas about gold standards and the futility of economic modelling...
Mathematically valid. Genuinely interesting. An active field of research. But heterodox, and thus coming with a stable of armchair physicists who are drawn to it because it feels rebellious.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics
Economics do not override politicians.
> Navarro's views on trade are considered outside the mainstream of economic thought. ... According to Politico, Navarro's economic theories are "considered fringe" by his fellow economists. A New Yorker reporter described Navarro's views on trade and China as so radical "that, even with his assistance, I was unable to find another economist who fully agrees with them."
> According to Lee Branstetter, economics professor at Carnegie Mellon University and trade expert with the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Navarro "was never a part of the group of economists who ever studied the global free-trade system... He doesn't publish in journals. What he's writing and saying right now has nothing to do with what he got his Harvard Ph.D. in... He doesn't do research that would meet the scientific standards of that community." Marcus Noland, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, described a tax and trade paper written by Navarro and Wilbur Ross for Trump as "a complete misunderstanding of international trade, on their part."
Tariffs as a tool to pivot towards an export focused economy isn’t a bad thing necessarily. But tools only help build things with a plan to guide them. Cooking up some formula with ChatGPT, printing a chart and taking a sweeping action is just dumb. It’s bad policy, bad implementation, bad leadership.
A smart leader would approach Canada and say “your tariffs and subsidy of onions are hurting our farmers”. A tariff is a tool that could neutralize that issue. The problem is, you need a smart leader and articulated vision.